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Justin.tv's new venture into live-streaming video games has more than 12 million unique visitors each month and the audience is growing more than 10 percent every month, the company announced today.

Justin.tv launched Twitch.tv in June. When you play a game, other people can see a live stream of your screen. And they can chat with each other.

Twitch.tv, or "Twitch," as it's called by Justin.tv founder Justin Kan, was built as a way to make professional video gamers more mainstream. It has a partner program similar to YouTube, where the most popular gamers can make money by running commercials during their live streams. They've signed on more than 1,000 partners since launching the partner program in August, Kan said.

We sat down with Kan to find out why the site is growing so quickly. Here's what we learned:

It's easy to make money as a gamer. To become a partner on the site, you only need around 500 concurrent viewers and 25,000 views on your streams. Most users hit those numbers with ease, says Kan.

Twitch.tv is now the main focus of Justin.tv. The company is going all-in — it's spun off its side projects and installed the former head of the project, Emmett Shear, as the chief operating officer of Justin.tv.

Professional gaming is at the same point professional poker was when it was getting started. The technology is finally in place for it to become more popular. Now, professional poker shows up on mainstream sports networks like ESPN. But you probably won't see professional video game players on channels any time soon, because the audience likes to stay online.

Justin.tv founder and president Justin Kan sucks at StarCraft. But his CEO Emmett Shear is pretty good — he's hit one of the highest rankings in the game. Kan and Shear are both huge gamers, which contributed to their interest in Twitch.

The gaming audience is very attractive to advertisers. Gamers usually sit on the site for nearly an hour, which means professional gamers can make between $50 and $200 for each commercial they run, depending on the time of day and a few other things.

Justin.tv is making money. Kan wouldn't disclose just how much, but he said Twitch, which launched in June and didn't really hit its stride until August, is already a majority of Justin.tv's revenue.

We've included the full transcript below:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Are you guys planning on running both Justin.tv and Twitch.tv at the same time?

JUSTIN KAN: Twitch.tv is a big focus for us. They started working on it as a small team, month over month they would grow and more and more resources would be focused on Twitch. Now, most of it is focused on Twitch. All the effort is on Twitch. Emmett (Shear) is still heading the project. The COO of Justin.tv, Mike, spun off SocialCam and Emmett is basically the COO of the company now.

BI: What happened with SocialCam?

JK: Twitch has a business model, it makes money, and it's built on the Justin.tv platform. SocialCam, we thought mobile video was really interesting, but there was no model, it was pre-revenue. We thought it was best-suited as its own company so we spun it off. They're working in their own office.

BI: What is it about Twitch, I know it's been growing insanely fast, but what is it that makes it really exciting?

JK: There's a couple things. People are super passionate about gaming, and you see that reflected in the growth and in person. I was just at DreamHack, a 20,000 person event in gaming, and the finals were basically like a real sports match. It was in a hockey arena. Day[9] (a very popular professional gamer) is on stage, they're announcing the players, and the arena is packed and the audience is massive. People follow it like real, traditional sports.

When we saw that we were like, this is amazing, we want to be a part of it. It's an awesome way to apply the really broad vision of the company. We were a platform and we grew as a platform to 30 million uniques but we were never really good at any one thing, except for scaling our technology. With gaming, we're able to really serve this community that's super-passionate, there's a viable model that makes money and you get to work with all these awesome partners, and we're at the forefront of creating this new sport. To us, that's super exciting.

MD: It helped that Justin and Emmett are big gamers.

BI: StarCraft?

JK: We're all StarCraft players, we play in the office after work all the time. I suck at it, I'm like platinum in StarCraft. (There are several ranks in StarCraft, with platinum being the fourth.)

BI: Did you guys think it would have grown as fast as it has?

JK: We started working on gaming about a year ago, it was just a category on Justin.tv. It was growing really consistently, between 10 and 20 percent month over month. Every month, 15 percent gets harder to do, but we were optimistic. We've kept it up. It wasn't too surprising, I guess. We see this massive amount of head-room in gaming. There are all these people that are potential viewers of content.

If you look at YouTube, gaming is the number 2 category right after Music. More and more people are being introduced to games through iPhone games and Android games. The audience for this content is just gonna grow. When we looked at why people were watching, I like to say it's similar to poker — 20 years ago, to hear that poker would be a big televised sport, you'd be like "what are you talking about." There were a few factors that contributed to that. There was a massive base of players and there's a technology advancement with the card cam. With some basic commentating, that made the game accessible to the casual viewer. They put it on ESPN and it's been pretty popular since then.

The same thing is happening with StarCraft. The game was dominant for 10 years and it's super popular, and then they built a spectator mode that you can watch and commentate over. They made it easy for you to create video content over the game. There's this new method of distribution with online streaming where people can create content really easily and get it to the global aggregate audience of gamers. People tried to put e-sports on television but there wasn't enough density for that to make sense. But by putting it online, I don't even own a TV any more, I watch all my content on the iPad and iPhone. That's where younger people are consuming entertainment — that's where Twitch and other online video services come in.

BI: You guys pretty much beat Ustream to the punch on this. Why were you able to jump them?

JK: We used to compete, the past couple years we would compete for events and music. One thing we found is that was really hard to monetize unless you sell directly to partners. It isn't a very scalable or repeatable solution, it's hard to monetize because the content isn't regular. What we found with gaming, the content happens over time. We were never very good about the business development around the entertainment industry, buying content like they would. We're more technologists focused on building a well-engineered platform. When it came to gaming it was cool because people were streaming gaming consistently over time. It was easy for us to identify with the vision of building a gaming video site.

MD: We've always been focused on building the platform for other people to build content on top of, whereas some of our competitors were far more interested in going out and selling content experiences — red carpet stuff, big celebrity entertainment things. While we're building the platform, we can keep a much closer eye on the content that's being created organically by our users. That's where the gaming category came from, it came out of nowhere — all of the sudden it was a huge portion of the content on the site. They took it, they decided we're gonna put some resources into it. This community deserves its own space and its own features.

BI: What threshold?

JK: We said 10 percent month-over-month on views, not uniques. Views have scaled much quicker than uniques. We exceeded that goal by quite a bit.

BI: Around when did you set those goals?

JK: Around the end of 2010. It totally worked. Then we decided on Twitch and went into launch mode. We don't really even consider Ustream competition, I don't even think they care about gaming. They did announce that South Korea thing, but I think one of the things they do, every time Livestream or we announce anything they announce the same thing. Often times, I think that's been a mistake. We've made mistakes in adding a feature to the site, in retrospect that didn't make sense. We think other sites like YouTube are our more real competitors.

BI: What kind of reaction have you guys seen for the Twitch app so far?

JK: People love it, it's a very clean-looking app. You can chat on it, it's the full experience. What we found is people really want to engage in the content on the go. They expect content to be where they are and that's one of the big focuses for next year — being ubiquitous and being on every platform. More like a Netflix strategy.

BI: What is it about watching gaming is so popular among your users?

JK: If you look at the time spent for sports, tennis say, 100 years ago 100 percent of your time around tennis would be playing it. Now it's 10 percent playing it, 50 percent watching it and 40 percent reading about it on ESPN. Activities around gaming 10 years ago is just playing it, then you added on reading editorial content about it, and now watching it is a thing. Video games are a cultural phenomenon, it's bigger than the movie industry, it's a $65 billion industry. Every person who's like our age and younger grew up playing as many video games as they did playing sports. People are passionate about watching sports and engaging in it, and I think the same is true in gaming.

JK: Our main goal is to grow the audience. 12 million far exceeded expectations but we think there's a lot of headroom. We want to be the gaming website. Building out for more platforms, figuring out ways people can find and consume the content. Our discovery is very rudimentary. We can do a lot better to get people the videos that we want them to see. Facebook is a big push, sharing on Facebook, we can improve the website reach. You should be able to find games from certain players. Right now that's not very exposed through the interface. Another thing is really enabling more and more people to do this as their full-time job by getting them more revenue and ramping up their advertising. We want to put more dollars in the hands of our partners.

BI: How valuable is your audience to advertisers?

MD: We can't speak to specific numbers, but it's far better than industry average on video advertising, because the audience is really valuable and the content is really sticky. The engagement is crazy, the average viewing session is 47 minutes. People like watching the content. On the advertising side we're figuring out ways we can ramp that us.

BI: How does the advertising work?

JK: We allow our content partners to show advertising when they want. They can show commercials. When a StarCraft pro player is practicing, they'll play for like 3 hours and every 20 minutes between matches he can type in "/commercial" and show commercials to all his viewers. It increases the yield by quite a bit. Our viewers know specifically that the advertising supports the broadcaster specifically. They're so ravenous about the personalities that they're happy to watch because they want this stuff. People beg for advertising — how often do you see that happen? The community is really passionate, they want to see it succeed and they're willing to do what it takes.

BI: How much money do you make off the matches?

JK: Some of the top players, if you get 20,000 concurrent viewers, that's anywhere between $50 and $200 per commercial depending on the seasonality of advertising, the time of day, so on and so forth.

BI: So if I'm a total badass at StarCraft, this can be my full-time job?

JK: A lot of the pro-players, they still compete for money in tournaments, but they might win only once every couple months or so. If you look at the players' winnings, even the best players don't win every tournament. Streaming and creating video content on Twitch is something that really helps regulate the income and smooth it out and gives you a monthly way to support yourself.

BI: Then you guys collect royalties?

JK: They run ads, we revenue share 50-50 with them. We do all the sales for the ads. The only side of the advertising business they see is a button and a check, basically.

BI: So are you starting to see real revenues that you weren't seeing at Justin.tv?

JK: A huge percentage of our revenue this year will be attributed to Twitch and it's loaded toward the later months. In the beginning it was 1 percent of our revenue, and it's definitely gonna be a significant part of our bottom line now.